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There was a posting 'Perpetual' by Rakesh discussing about two articles published by New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that described how adolescence is increasingly being stretched into adulthood.

Few points to note from his posting talking about the articles mentioned:1. A new generation of American parents are involving too much in the education of their children."A new generation of overinvolved parents [who] are flooding campus orientations, meddling in registration and interfering with students' dealings with professors, administrators and roommates".2. Many parents are considering thier children's education as an investment, and expect to be treated as customer by universities.3. Youngsters are depending on their parents for everything and expect parents to solve their problems.A bottle-fed upbringing has created a dependent generation that expects their parents to solve all their problems…

Forbes announced 'India's Richest 40', the second annual list of 40 richest Indians. The list is nicely represented by IT, the industry that created all the buzz about India than any other industry. The next sector that created more buzz is telecom and is aswell represented nicely in the list, though IT and Telecom are still behind the tycoons from Steel and Petrochemicals overall.Link to Forbes StoryThere is something more interesting information in the list. There is a comparision between China's top 40 list and India's top 40 list. India has 27 billionaires with a collective worth of $106 billion compared to 10 from china with a collective worth of $26 billion. And there is little more for Indians to party. The minimum networth of the people in the list is $590million in India where as China's minimum net worth stands at $321 million.

But there is some thing interesting mentioned at the botton of the comparision, which brings a starking difference to light be…

There is an interesting debate going on between proponents of Humane Interfaces and Minimal Interfaces. It looks like, Ruby camp is representing the Humane Interfaces while Java camp is representing the later. The debate started with a posting by Martin Fowler "HumaneInterface". And here is a summary of the debate., referred to as the Monkey knife fight.

I favor the Humane Interface camp. The interface should reflect all reasonably common scenarios it can be used. Not just the minimal building blocks. Let me explain by an example. Assume you have a Math class and a method add. As per mimimal interface camp, this is enough to carry out addition, subtraction and multiplication. It is true that you CAN do all those operations with add method. But not without user writing some code on top. Like if you want mulitplication, you would write a loop to add it as many times or some other smart logic. Imagine you have 1000 different users use your class. All 1000 users have to dup…

I can't comprehend the implications of removing Saddam and establishing Democracy in Iraq. But denying the chance to live to 30,000 innocent civilians, doesn't sound appropriate. I do not know whether the world or America is safer without Saddam. But America's safety certainly became a nightmare to Iraqi civilians. Why do 30,000 Iraqi people have to pay the price for the safety of America?

Bush replying to a question (why war on Iraq when there was no conclusive involvement of Iraq in 9/11 attacks), said "knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country." I really don't know if America is safer without Saddam. I seriously doubt that. As much as the America's success to catch the real men behind 9/11.

Tom Peters in his 'This I Believe' puts an intriguing and fascinating end to Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) belief in order to create some thing new... the next big thing.

Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) is...Very Dangerous Stuff.Caught with our pants down by vigorous Japanese competitors, we Americans quickly copied their essential competitive ideas, such as Total Quality Management and Kaizen. Fair enough! Brilliant, in fact! Yet these important notions are in part cornerstones of an earlier, industrial ageâ€¦when winning products stayed on the shelves in showroom floors for years, even decades. Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at todayÊ¼s â€œsportâ€) gets in the way of ferreting out the NextBig Thing. My de facto mentors in all this are media guru Marshall McLuhan (â€œIf it works, itÊ¼s obsoleteâ€) and I…

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates, launches the next generation of integrated computing platform - Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 in India on December 9, 2005. Joining in the celebration is the Indian Rock band â€“ Parikrama with a rock song just for our Indian developers. Called `Superhero' the song is about the life of a programmer. http://www.microsoft.com/india/ready2005/song/default.aspx

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is." -- Albert Einstein What do you appreciate and what do you ignore? Is a sunrise any less special because its image wouldn't make it on a magazine cover? Is any day less precious because, in your mind, "nothing special happened?" For some reason, it's hard to be impressed with anything these days. Driving a car is a source of strain instead of wonder. The internet is already old news. Quick, when was the last time you paid attention to a space shuttle flight? Remember when that was all people could talk about? Once you take something for granted, you also take the life out of it. When nothing is "special", boredom and gloom aren't far behind. Look around where you're sitting right now, and try to see it for the first time, like a child would. Think about the human potential that created the stuff in the room. Think about the…

Here is a classic, "Create or Perish", by Dr. Robert Rines available at MIT open course ware explains how the patent system works. The patents surrounding telephone were used to illustrate various issues with the system.

Wrt to software products, whether you believe in the patent system or in open source, this is good read to understand how patents works.

Strategy is a long term plan that gives an edge. Suicide is a fool's strategy to get an edge over death.

SUN Microsystems announced in a Press Release recently that most of its Middleware and Development tools are now 'free' to use. Not long ago, SUN made its flagship OS, solaris unix free and open source.

Though the press release boasts of the move as "landmark moves in the battle to create the software platform of choice for the next-generation of the Internet" the desperation however shows up without notice. As per the recent reports, SUN has been failing for a long time to have sustainable revenue. SUN has been reported loosing its servers market to Linux. It created Java, but never made any considerable revenue on it. And adding to the insult last month 84% of Sun stockholders voted for the repeal of Posion Pill, and thus making it clear that it is desperate to survive at least by a take over.